Belt rat spawns

BELT NPC SYSTEM

This is introduction to Asteroid Belt NPC rat systems, mostly focusing to deep end 0.0 belts.

See also introduction to Pirate hunting and description of NPC rats. There is also separate guide discussing various advanced ratting tactics

In general 0.0 ratting provides comparable income with level 4 missions, although may be more monotone and boring.

Spawn generation

Spawn is a group of 1 - 8 NPC rats seen on belts and gates; it appears and fights together.

Each time a player starts a warp towards inner grid of an asteroid belt, the system checks whether the belt will be empty, or whether you'll get a spawn, and of what type the spawn is.

Each system has maximum number for spawns, which depends on total amount of asteroid belts, and may depend on security status. For example, 2 belt system seems to always have 2 spawns, while a four belt system will have 3 spawns as the limit.

For systems with numerous belts the limit seems to be half of the number of the belts. For example 24 belt system has limit of about 15, while 38 belt system has limit around 22.

Thus the fewer belts the system has, the more likely you are to get spawn on given belt.

Spawn stability

Once the spawn is generated, it will stay in the system until downtime unless disturbed. Thus if you quickly check spawns on system, and return 12 hours later, you will find the same spawns unless someone else disturbed them.

Disturbing in this context means killing the spawn, or hanging around the spawn long enough to make it vanish.

If system has empty belts (any 3+ belt system), the spawns may randomly switch belts they are in.

Spawns have some chance to just vanish if you hang around; in my experience one in 25 spawns did that. Consequently, if you find a really valuable target, kill it fast.

Respawning timers

If you kill a part of a spawn, the killed ships will reliably reappear in 20 to 25 minutes. This allows farming tactic: leaving a low end ship of a good spawn and waiting for the rest to reappear.

If you kill the whole spawn, after the same 20 - 25 minutes the game will allow a new random spawn on the system.

Typical spawns in deep 0.0

These values apply equally to any NPC home system (like Stain), and good -1.0 true sec non-sov system. No statistics yet how system security status in non-sovereignty system affects.

Although different NPC race have different ships names, and varying weapon / EW systems, seems the ships follow mostly the same distribution in regards to bounty. That is, chance of getting three 1.4M bounty NPC battleship is same whether you are hunting Guristas or Sanshas.

Regular spawns consist of 1-3 upper end ships (BS to Cruiser class) and 1-3 lower end ships (Cruiser to Frigate class). You are more likely to get 2 or 3 ships (40% chance each) per type, rather than lone one (20% chance).

The median spawn would be 2x500k BSes with escort of 2 or 3 13k frigates. Average total bounties of the spawn seem to be 1.4M, while median is only 1.0M.

Only 11% of spawns will have total bounties over 3M, and mere 3% will have 4M+. Majority, 50%, has total under 1M.

Special spawns

In belts you may encounter three kind of special spawns, namely officers, faction/commander and mineral/hauler spawns. If you try to farm such spawn, only non-special ships of the spawn will reappear.

These special spawns being rare, it is rather difficult to get good estimates of the chances for their apperance.

Anyway, some guesses:

• Chance for faction and hauler spawn is of same magnitude
• The chance to get a faction spawn is somewhere between one per 20 to 50 cleared spawns, at least in good 0.0 space.
• You could expect to run into officer spawn for every 20 - 40 faction spawns you find. Thus chance for officer is about one in 400 - 2000 cleared spawns, at least in good 0.0 space.
• Seems likely that 'NPC home' regions, like Stain, have increased chance for officer spawns.

Should note that active farming will drop your chances to see special spawns to half or so, depending on how good spawns you keep.

Officer spawns

These seem to consist of officer with heavier than usually escort. You could see like 30M bounty specially named guy, like Vizan Ankonn, and 4 random battleships as escort.

Finding an officer spawn wont always mean a jackpot; of 6 officers I have ever found only one dropped over 1B worth of loot. Loot usually consist of 0-4 officer items, and 1-8 faction items.

Faction spawns

These tend to look almost normal, with one ship turned to faction/commander variant who has 7.5 times the normal bounty. This faction ship may be of any size, and is named according NPC race specific class, like Sanshas -> True Sanshas. See full list at description of rats.

Hauler spawns

These appear in group of 1 to 4 hauler class ship, with random escort of 1-3 other ships. Most common is 'Hauler' with 3.1M Tritanium. Other typical haulers are Convoy (12.5M), Carrier (25.0M) and Trailer (6.5M). You might occasionally also run into Transporter, Bulker, Trucker or Loader.

Instead of tritanium you may find other minerals, 70% less minerals by each step. So in Carrier you could find 25M Trit, 8.50M Pyerite or even 18.5k Megacyte. You will see low-ends much more often than high ends.

Thus maximum sized, and rare, spawn would be 4 carriers, dropping 100M tritanium. Would need 30 rigged Iteron trips, or 8 Rorquel hauls to carry that home.

Belt rat anomalies

• Seems warping on the belt grid is not always enough to trigger a spawn; probably needs to target some smaller trigger area. Thus you could first warp to 300km and see nothing. Then warping to 0 km and seeing a spawn as soon as you start warp.
• Occasionally you might see two separate spawn in belts. This appears to be related from one spawn moving on another belt without the earlier spawn having gone yet.
• Run-away spawns : sometimes a spawn may decide to leave the belt, and start flying away at maximum speed, perhaps towards another belt. After a while these will leave the visible grid area, and be very hard to find. System NPC spawn limit will be down by one till such rogue spawn is killed or downtime resets the system.
• Although system specific limit is good for telling how many spawns you can expect (at least on small system), there is small chance of expected spawn not appearing. In a test set of 200 Guristas spawns in -1.0 two belt system this happened 4 times; in set of 2x200 Sanshas two belt systems 0 times.
• Starting a warp away from belt may trigger spawn on start belt
• You may seem spawns, even officer ones, on gate grids as well. These seem to be independent of belt spawns, and are too rare to give any chance estimates here.